Howto: Setup Wordpress on CentOS

WordPress is known as one of the most popular blogging platform and content management systems out there. It's built on top of a LAMP Stack and it's really easy to setup.

Here I will show you how easy it is to setup:

Download Package:

$ cd /tmp/
$ wget https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
$ tar -xvf latest.tar.gz

Pre-Requisites:

PHP-GD
LAMP Stack

Use this one-liner to determine if the module is installed, else it will install it for you

if [[ `rpm -q php-gd  | grep "not installed"  | wc -l` -eq "1" ]]; then $(which yum) install php-gd -y; else echo "php-gd installed"; fi

MySQL: Create the DB and Setup the User

$ mysql -u root -p

// create the database
mysql> CREATE DATABASE wordpress_db;

# create the user
mysql> CREATE USER wordpress_user@localhost;

# set the password
mysql> SET PASSWORD FOR wordpress_user@localhost= PASSWORD("secret");

# grant all privileges for the user
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress_db.* TO wordpress_user@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'secret';
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> exit;

Apache: Prepare the Directories

$ mkdir /var/www/html/wordpress
$ mv wordpress/* /var/www/html/wordpress/
$ cp /var/www/html/wordpress/wp-config-sample.php /var/www/html/wordpress/wp-config.php

Apache: Configure Wordpress DB Settings

edit wp-config.php

$ vi /var/www/html/wordpress/wp-config.php

define('DB_NAME', 'wordpress_db');
define('DB_USER', 'wordpress_user');
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'secret');

Permissions

$ chown -R apache:apache /var/www/html/wordpress
$ find /var/www/html/wordpress/ -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
$ find /var/www/html/wordpress/ -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

Access Wordpress

Access wordpress on 'http://your-endpoint/wordpress/' continue the installation, then you should be able to access your wordpress site.

Note on Security:

Always remember to only allow your application layer to communicate with MySQL so that your MySQL server don't get hacked.

Optional: SSL Encryption

If you would like to encrypt your info on your wordpress site, see Setup SSL